By Chris Kornelis

At the height of the disco era, Rocco Commisso hit pause on the Bee Gees.

At Act III, the club in the Bronx that he ran with his brother, Commisso dedicated 20 minutes an hour to romantic Italian music for couples who wanted to dance slowly and hold each other close. The idea was a hit that made not only money, but, he would later say, a lot of marriages.

"I was really into Italian music and came up with this idea that by specializing in something as opposed to being just like anybody else, we could do well and nobody could touch us in terms of the competition because nobody had it," he told "60 Minutes" in 2023.

Nearly two decades later, Commisso started his own cable business on the same strategy of going where all the competitors weren't: While the largest cable operators in the country were clustering around the nation's biggest cities, he went for some of the smallest. He built a cable company by buying up cable operators in small towns and rural and suburban areas. The logic was simple: These operators cost a lot less to buy, and customers were customers -- wherever they lived.

"I think Rocco was brilliant in the sense that he knew that a potential rural customer was just as valuable as a potential urban customer," said Tom Rutledge, a friend and the former chief executive of Charter Communications.

When Commisso died, Jan. 16, at the age of 76, after what the family called a "long period of medical treatment," Forbes magazine had recently estimated his net worth at $5.6 billion, largely tied to his ownership of Mediacom, the cable company that he built into one of the largest in the U.S. by combining cable systems that he once called the "scraps that no one else wants."

"What we have done," he said in 1997, "is to seize the opportunity that other people did not see."

Born in Italy, made in America

Rocco Benito Commisso was born in Marina di Gioiosa Ionica, in southern Italy's Calabria region, on Nov. 25, 1949, to Giuseppe and Maria Rosa Commisso. His father served in Africa with the Italian army during World War II. He emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1956, bringing Rocco's older half-brother, Nicola Murdocca, with him. Rocco, along with his two sisters and mother, joined them in 1962. The next year, the family moved to the Bronx.

Rocco Commisso didn't speak English when he arrived in the U.S., but he did play the accordion, a skill that he parlayed into an education.

He won a talent show at a local movie theater, where he was invited to perform regularly. He later talked the manager into writing a letter on his behalf to a Catholic high school, asking them to admit Commisso even though he had missed the entrance exam. When he got in, he worked in his brother's restaurants -- a lunch counter, then a pizzeria -- to pay his tuition.

During his senior year of high school, he talked his gym teacher into calling New York University to try to wrangle him a soccer scholarship, even though he had played handball in high school, not soccer (the school didn't have a team). When NYU offered him only a 50% scholarship, he and his teacher tried Columbia, which gave him a full-ride scholarship and a spot on the soccer team.

After earning a degree in industrial engineering in 1971, he went to work at Pfizer. He returned to Columbia to get his M.B.A. during the day and worked at Pfizer at night. He graduated in 1975, the year he and Murdocca opened their disco. He was repeatedly turned down for investment banking because he was told he wasn't the right fit.

He once told Forbes: "I'll never forget the guy from Kuhn, Loeb telling me: 'Rocco, you know what your problem is? You're neither Jewish nor Irish. The Italians haven't arrived on Wall Street.' "

Commisso eventually got a job in commercial banking at Chase Manhattan, where his boss was unaware that he was moonlighting at a nightclub.

"That explained why he was so tired on Monday mornings," Tom Reifenheiser, his former boss, later said in an interview.

At Chase, Commisso worked his way onto a team that worked on cable deals. In 1986, he went to the other side of the table, joining Alan Gerry's Cablevision Industries as chief financial officer. He stayed at Cablevision for a decade, during which Gerry credited him with helping turn his company into the eighth largest cable operator in the U.S.

Commisso didn't like it when Gerry decided to sell his company to Time Warner in 1995. He didn't think it was the time to sell. He wanted to buy. So, he founded Mediacom and started picking up cable systems in places like Ridgecrest, Calif.; Caruthersville, Mo.; and throughout Iowa, Delaware, Maryland and Florida. Commisso took the company public in 2000 and private in 2011. It's now solely owned by the Commisso family.

Steve Simmons, a friend and fellow cable entrepreneur, said one of the reasons Commisso was successful is that he stuck with his strategy.

"He didn't decide all of a sudden I'm going to be in the middle of Los Angeles, or I'm going to be by Houston," Simmons said. "He stuck with his strategy of going to these, for the most part, smaller markets that were not in the middle of a bunch of competitors, and stayed there."

Commisso's survivors include his wife, Catherine Commisso, and his children, Giuseppe and Marisa Commisso.

A loud player

By the time he was running Mediacom, Commisso, the boy who came to the U.S. unable to speak English, had long since become a man with a colorful, high-decibel vocabulary. Some found him abrasive and unpleasant to work with. To others, he was, big, warm and pleasantly noisy. He continued to play the accordion until he was 75.

"Everybody in the room turns and looks at Rocco when he comes in the room," said Amos Hostetter Jr., who built one of the largest cable companies in the U.S., Continental Cablevision, and sold it around the time Commisso started buying, "because he's so big and so loud and so full of fun."

Although he stuck to his strategy with cable, he diversified his holdings by entering the soccer business, buying a majority stake in the New York Cosmos in 2017 (the family is now a minority owner) and Italy's ACF Fiorentina in 2019. He had similar expectations for the players on his soccer teams as he did for the employees of his cable company.

"They may lose," he said in 2019, after he purchased ACF Fiorentina, "but they better work hard."

Write to Chris Kornelis at chris.kornelis@wsj.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 20, 2026 12:27 ET (17:27 GMT)

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